Irish Irregularity Looks Very Irregular

I am currently studying future tense in Irish. I have already made my way through chapters on imperative, past tense, and present.

I would like to give you an example of a little sliver of what can happen with one verb’s forms. The permutations are dazzling.

The verb, faigh (get), is irregular, but still! This picture was taken under a red umbrella outdoors at a café, which accounts for the pinkness. I had to retake the picture because I forgot an h in one of the forms. I am constantly forgetting h’s in Irish words, where they pop up prolifically.

Faigh: A Rogue Verb

My amazing experiences on the Irish Language Forum are making me realize I have not taken enough advantage of online forums. Or “fora,” if you prefer (though that makes me think reflexively of “fora and fauna”).

If you want to learn Welsh, you can try the SaySomethinginWelsh site. And I see a forum for Dutch here. I’m sure you can find forums and fora for any language I have here on this site. One of my tasks, after I have finished with Yiddish this summer, is to go back and research online language forums and then post recommendations in my Reviews section. I also want to add a forum on this site at some point soon, so that people can comment in a more centralized location rather than only on individual blog and review entries.

On a non-Irish, non-Welsh, non-Dutch, non-etc. topic, I am considering the possibility of offering online classes in English as a foreign language here. As some of you know, in my working life I teach business writing, grammar, and e-mail etiquette workshops through my company, Syntaxis. Those classes are designed primarily for native speakers, but I get quite a few non-native speakers in them as well, and I would like to begin doing more work in the realm of ESL/EFL.

Although I am still exploring technological options at present, the idea is that the online classes would be available globally to individual registrants. The sessions would probably be about an hour each and would include audio and video. If you are interested in this idea, please let me know!